Some Preliminaries: Politics has Consequences

This is the last of these before I start zeroing in on some topics more particular to the US. 

Something that strikes me a great deal with political discussions is how often it takes the frame of either simple tribalism, liberals are socialists vs conservatives are theocrats for example, or how often it is treated as simply some sort of complete abstraction where individuals struggle over a distribution of resources with little in the way of real world consequences to specific distributions beyond one group getting stronger and another weaker.

While I understand the potential usefulness of these attitudes towards rallying support or analysis (respectively) I think it is critical to remember that many policies have powerful long run impacts.  There are a few that no doubt are purely distributional, these policies will distribute resources among various groups and reflect particular visions of society without any society-wide consequences beyond this distribution.

These policies are the exception.  At the end of most of them, there may be a child later suffering long term unemployment due to insufficient nourishment or medical care early in life leading to long term deficiencies, slower economic growth leaving skilled people unemployed with broken families as a result, and on a broader level, mass unrest, political collapse, and war.  These aren't often the consequences of a single decision but rather a series of them.  Regarding many of our political debates, in the longer run one viewpoint, or a small handful, is correct, the rest are wrong.  If we follow the wrong policies we will not be able to compete with nations pursuing the correct ones.  We will fall behind, our standard of living will fall, and the consequences will eventually be huge.

This is why it is critical to step outside of partisanship and attempt to ask what our problems really are and how do we fix them.  Sticking to political principles or a belief in how society should work is not enough, while I have the right, and perhaps the duty, to sacrifice my own success for deeper principles or beliefs I do not have the same right to apply this thinking to others through the political system.  There is no justice in picking a principled course of action that results in harm, or even death, to others.  It is rare to have a political decision that will not result in harm to someone; this gives us an obligation to think about the long term consequences of our actions to seek to minimize the extent to which the actions we take will cause this harm to others, which is something we have no right to do.  Of course, at this level inaction is the same as action, failing to pursue a policy that would mitigate this harm imposes the same moral obligation on us that taking an action that causes would.  Which is why it is so important not to prove any of our ideas right but to instead focus on getting the right idea, no matter how much this contradicts our existing beliefs.